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and grand. The trough in the middle is a little-sized tank. The two-storied buildings, all round, are neat and elegant. The great hall has a royal magnificence. But it is profusely adorned, in the Mahomedan taste, with chandeliers, and lanterns, and wall-shades of all the colours of the rainbow. The surface of the walls is painted in blue and red inscriptions from the Koran. Nothing can be more gorgeous than the doors of the gateway. They are richly gilded all over, and upon them is inscribed, in golden letters, the date and history of the Musjeed.

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No circumstance should render the name of Hooghly so memorable, as its being the place where was first set up, in our country, the Press, which Bulwer emphatically calls our second Saviour.' It was put up in 1778 by Messrs Halhed and Wilkins, on the occasion of the publication of a Bengallee Grammar by the first of these two gentlemen. From that year was Hindoo literature emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the mystification and falsification of the Brahmins. The great event is scarcely remembered, and has not been thought worth taking notice of by any of our historians, though it has done far more for our civilization and well-being than can be hoped for from railroads and telegraphs.

The Bandel church is the oldest Christian church in Bengal, built, according to the inscribed date, in 1599. The Portuguese Jesuits had very much disgusted the Empress Mumtaza by their worship of pictures and images, and this feeling had no small share in bringing about the destruction of the Portuguese Settlement.

Satgaon.-Triveni.

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Prior to Hooghly, the royal port of Bengal was Satgaon. The Ganges formerly flowed by this place, and came out near Andool. There have turned out the remains of wrecked vessels beneath the earth which has overlaid the bed of the deserted channel. Satgaon is of great antiquity, having been known to the Romans under the name of Ganges Regia. It is said to have been a royal city, of immense size, in which resided the kings of the country. The first Europeans who came to Bengal describe two ports,-one Chittagong, the other Satgaon. The Dutch of Chinsurah had many country-seats here in the last century. Probably, the diversion of the course of the Ganges first led to the decay of this emporium of trade. The ultimate erection of Hooghly into the royal port occasioned its total ruin. It is now a mean village, without any remains of its former greatness, except a small elegant mosque. Literally, Satgaon or Supta-gram means the 'seven villages.' The well-known Mullick families of Calcutta are originally from Satgaon, whence they removed to Hooghly, and thence to Calcutta.

Came to Triveni, or the junction of three waters; a sacred prayag like Allahabad, where is held an annual mêla in March for purposes of ablution. Long had this been the ultima thule of a Calcutta cockney, beyond which he scarcely made a voyage into the regions of the Mofussil Proper. Triveni is also a very old place, being spoken of by both Pliny and Ptolemy. It is a school of great repute for indigenous Sanscrit. The great Pundit Juggernauth Turkopunchanun, who was Sanscrit tutor

to Sir William Jones, and who compiled the digest of Hindoo laws, under the patronage of Lord Cornwallis, was a native of this village. He had an extraordinary memory, and an anecdote is related of him, that as he was coming home one day from his bath in the Ganges, he met a Kaffer and Chinaman abusing and fighting with each other in the streets. The case coming to the police, he was subpoenaed for evidence. He came and told to the magistrate that he had neither understood the language of the Kaffer nor that of the Chinaman, but he remembered the words each had uttered, and exactly repeated them from his memory, to the astonishment of all. Beyond Triveni commences the regular world of rurality. Brick-houses are now rarely seen, and ghauts and pagodas occur at long intervals. The river now expands in a broader surface, but loses the grandeur of its prospect by the interruption of sand-banks.

Four miles north of Triveni is Doomurdah. This is an extremely poor village, but noted very much for its robbers and river dacoits. To this day people fear to pass by this place after sunset, and no boats are ever moored at its ghaut, even in broad day-light. Traders, on their way home with the accumulated savings of the year, ran considerable risk of being stopped, plundered, and murdered near Doomurdah. Men, receiving their pay and annual buckshish, and returning once in a twelvemonth at the Poojah holidays to their country residences—where 'there was an eye that would mark their coming, and look brighter when they came '—and where the

Doomurdah,

'Children ran to lisp their sire's return,

And climb'd the knees the envied kiss to share,'

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had, in hundreds of instances, to deliver their purses, and then fall victims to the pirates, who either threw them overboard, or sprung a leak in their boats. The famous robber-chief, known by the name of Bishonauth Baboo, lived here about sixty years ago. It was his practice to afford shelter to all wayworn and benighted travellers, and to treat them with every show of courtesy and hospitality. But all this profuse display of kind-heartedness at last terminated in the midnight murder of the guests in their sleep. Many were the victims thus hugged into snares, and then committed quietly to the peace of a watery grave, before his deadly deeds transpired to the public, and he was caught to end his days on the scaffold. His depredations extended as far as Jessore, and his whereabouts being never certainly known, he long eluded the search of the police. He was at length betrayed by one of his comrades, surrounded in the hut of his courtesan in the midst of a jungle, seized when overcome by wine, and then hanged on the spot to strike terror into the neighbourhood. The house in which he lived still stands; it is a two-storied brick-built house just overlooking the river, whence he used to

'Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies,
With all the thirsting eye of enterprise.'

Past associations give to Doomurdah a gloomy and dismal look. The inhabitants are all jellas and mallas— boatmen and fishermen-many of whose fishing-nets

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were drying in the sun. They are, or rather were, every one of them leagued together to fish by day, and cut throats at night.

Fifty years ago there were many noble houses in Sooksagur. The Marquis of Cornwallis often came hither to spend the summer months, now passed by the Viceroy in Simla. This was the country-seat of our Governors previous to the erection of the park at Barrackpore. The Revenue Board was also established here on its removal from Moorshedabad. The river

has encroached upon and washed away the greater part of Sooksagur, leaving not a vestige of its numerous buildings. In the great inundation of 1823 a good-sized pinnace sailed through the Sooksagur bazar.

Chagdah, or Chackra-dah, is an abyss said to have been made by the chariot-wheel of Bhagiruth. The legend points to an antiquity, which is not borne out by any old vestiges or ancient population. The place is'at best a mart, or outlet, for the agricultural produce of the neighbouring districts, being crowded with warehouses and brothels that generally compose an Indian bazar. There is always a large number of boats moored at the ghauts. The place is also a great Golgotha, where the dead and dying are brought from a great way off to be burnt and consigned to the Ganges. The deceased is seldom conveyed by any of his relatives, unless from a short distance. Poor people generally send forward their dead for incremation in charge of bearers, who never betray the trust reposed in them.

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